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Tuesday, October 8, 2013

YouTube for Windows Phone epic fail... again

Windows Phone is having considerable problems on multiple fronts. Still, there is no functional official YouTube app due to disagreements between Google and Microsoft. After multiple attempts, Microsoft has released YouTube for Windows Phone 3.2, but according to the users, the app performs extremely poorly and hardly ever works.

Google has so far shown very little interest to support the Windows Phone smartphone operating system and as a result, Google has never released any official YouTube app for Windows Phone. Since YouTube is a popular service for many users, Microsoft has attempted to remedy this by releasing their own YouTube for Windows Phone app. However, this has been shown to be a bit difficult and every time Microsoft releases an app, Google blocks the app due to it breaking certain terms of use for YouTube. For example, the YouTube app from Microsoft has removed all ads, something which obviously upsets Google and clearly breaks the terms of use.

Now, Microsoft has once again released YouTube for Windows Phone v. 3.2. Although this time, it appears that Microsoft has fallen back to native web-browser version, meaning that the app, in essence, only launches and shows the YouTube content in a browser window. For some reason though, even this newly released app does not function and users are reporting that the app simply does not function and does not playback YouTube videos.

While it may be tempting to blame Google of purposely sabotaging Microsoft's attempts, the truth is that there are plenty of other unofficial YouTube apps that works just great. It might very well be that Microsoft needs to read and understand the terms of use and respect those of other companies. Today, pulling stunt such as creating your own HTML "standard" that breaks the existing standards simply does not work any longer, even if you are Microsoft, and Microsoft should learn to comply to the rules that the rest of the world plays with.